For a long time I've watched VCs waste their money on companies whose product is a complete pile of s***t. So this is the place where I will vent my anger on these unbelievably dumb ideas and sites.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

SezWho - Smells Like Stinky Poo

Continuing my "smells bad series" is another startup called SezWho. Never mind the fact that the name itself it stupid, "SezWho - Me, you jerk" the whole idea of behind this company is outright dumb. According to TechCrunch, "It focuses on simply helping separate the good commentors from the noise by adding ratings and reputations to your blog comments."

I have a question, who the hell cares. So what if you or your readers can sort your posts comments by the most trustworthy commenter. Who gives a damn about those people, whose new professional career is "A Professional Commenter On Sites That Don't Matter". SezWho just raised another million dollars to speed up development, but it isn't even clear how are they supposed to make money off their product.

The participants in their program put a widget on their site that will show author popularity beside those author's comments and some Red Carpet (Ooh, that's clever) widget that you can stick on the front page of your blog/site to showcase you best commenters. (as a side note, blogger's spell check underlined the word commenters).

Of course people who would like to gain rating from their comments will have to sign up with SezWho and possibly visit the place once in a while to see their ratings, but I don't see it generating much traffic to justify 1 million dollar investement, even if they manage to sell 1 million dollar worth of ad space. No one will be looking at the ads, because no one is going to be there, just like all of those widget providers for sites, no one will see you ads, because most people will come to your site once, just to sign up and get the widget.

So here's my bile about SezWho and another dumb idea by a company that only "has a more basic offering than the Disqus or Intense Debate", yet they receive $1 million dollars in financing. What a waste.

2 comments:

Being a destination site and generating a lot of traffic is not the only way to monetize on Web. There are a number of other subscription and other information based approaches that can generate a lot of revenues...NavTeq Anybody?

We are building a reputation infrastructure that incentivizes participation, increases traffic to sites and make it easy to browser and discover content based on people...We think based on that we will be able to monetize our service more than successfully.

Look we are not a comment replacement company...We think that products like WP, MT, Blogger etc. do a good enough job of managing comments and the users are really not interested in giving their comments to a third party in exchange for helping that 3rd party build a community...In fact we really don't think our users want us to compete with them for traffic...So comparing us to comment replacement services like Disqus or Intense Debate really does not make any sense.